Wednesday, July 9, 2014

#1112: Louis Savain

First, an honorable mention to Terry Savage, formerly finance
columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times, for this idiotic rant,
but it’s not quite enough to earn him his very own entry.

Louis Savain, who calls himself a “rebel scientist”, is probably
a minor figure, but deserves exposure as an excellent example of a certain
mindset. Savain is a crackpot who disagrees with most of the major discoveries
in modern science, including relativity and evolution, and has written several
posts of “scientific” takedowns of theories of which he appears to have a
rather tenuous grasp. Instead, Savain comes up with his own hypotheses and
theories, often based to a greater or lesser extent on the Bible.

Of course, none of his work has yet appeared in any peer-reviewed
scientific journals, but there is a reason for that.
“Forget it. I believe in going directly to the customer, i.e., the public whom
you despise, but who ultimately pays for all science research. They are my
peers. I’ll stay away from politically-correct publications, thank you very
much.” Ah yes, the corruption of the peer review process. Savain appears to be
dimly aware that his work may not pass scrutiny by experts in the relevant
fields, and responds in a manner brilliantly illustrative of the crank mindset:
“Indeed, the whole peer-review system was designed as a control mechanism
intended to exclude a large part of humanity from taking part in the scientific
enterprise. This is incompatible with the ideals of a democratic society, in my
opinion. We did not get rid of one dictatorship to succomb [sic] under the
tiranny [sic] of another.”

At least he makes testable predictions, which is unusual for
crackpots. For instance, Savain has repeatedly predicted the fall of Darwinism:
“Assuming that the ID hypothesis is correct, one can argue that, since humans
are the dominant species on earth, the designers must have had a special
interest in us when they began their project. My hypothesis is that they are
conducting an experiment, the purpose of which is to distinguish between
believers and deniers. Given their vast intellect, it is certain that they
anticipated the current conflict. If so, it is highly likely that they would
have left us a secret message, a message so powerful that its mere publication
would cause the collapse of the materialist fortress.” The secret message is of
course found in the Book of Revelation together with the stuff about horsemen. The
message will at least ensure that “the Darwinian walls will come crumbling down
like the old walls of Jericho. Sweet revenge.” Science, yo.

Here are some predictions Savain has made about the cerebellum and challenged
scientists to falsify. Of course, since the predictions contradict current
neurology, they must be counted as already falsified, though Savain apparently
fails to notice. Here Savain falsifies Einstein’s physics. It really is precious.

Diagnosis: Even after years of looking into crackpots Savain
remains a special case for his blatant demonstration of the Dunning-Kruger effect,
extraordinary even for a crank. But everything else is very, very typical.